ABSTRACT
Whatever women may be, I thought that men, in the nineteenth century, were above superstition.
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, 1860.
The title of Freud’s magnum opus echoes a well-known, perhaps even notorious, form of street literature.1 Dream books were as old as publishing itself, and for a short while towards the end of the nineteenth century became, in Britain at least, the dominant form of chapbook.2 They were particularly aimed at women readers, forming an important part of women’s popular culture. In using the same title, Freud was linking his own ‘interpretation of dreams’ to the many widespread interpretations that circulated in popular ‘dreamers’, and it is reasonable to assume that he expected some comparison to be made. Not only was he aware of the genre, but he seemed to acknowledge a debt of inspiration to it: ‘One day I discovered to my great astonishment that the view of dreams which came nearest to the truth was not the medical but the popular one, half involved though it still was in superstition’.3 He rejected the scientific opinion advanced by writers such as Carl Binz, that dreams were froth (‘Träume sind Schäume’), and was drawn, instead, to the popular view that dreams have a meaning, ‘which can be discovered by some process of interpretation of a content which is often confused and puzzling’. Distancing himself from those who smiled at attempts to find a significance in dreams, Freud set out, with what we now know to be revolutionary consequences, to replace the ancient, traditional code of meanings that came in every street pedlar’s stock of dream books with his own collection of symbols – a new lexicography of dreaming. By developing the role of dreams as fragments of suppressed wishes he appropriated the common dream book’s emphasis on fear, hope and desire; but by tracing those fragments back to childhood and repression, he transformed a significant aspect of nineteenth-century women’s culture, moving the focus of dreams from the future to the past. The time-hallowed nature
of dreams in chapbook literature, as oracles of the future consulted chiefly by women, was superseded.
